This reader found Mr. Luce’s latest essay to be awash in Trump Hysterics, that reads in part like a denial of responsibility. In sum, the Neo-Liberals, whose Utopianism has collapsed, just as its theology of The Self-Correcting Market has proven to be another mirage. And more importantly Luce, as one of those Neo-Liberals, fails to see his responsibility in creating the economic/political conditions that led to Trump and Trumpism. Republican Nihilism expressed as ‘NO’ to all of Obama’s attempts at ‘the art of the possible’, and the rise of the Tea Party Jacobins. The Tea Party faction then purged the Conservatives from the Party, as insufficiently radical, Richard Luger being the most ignominious case of that purge!

Against that backdrop we have Obama’s de facto pardon of Wall Street Thieves rationalized as ‘putting the past behind us’! The political pronouncement of FDR of ‘I welcome your hatred’ was utterly foreign territory to this New Democrat. Note Obama’s fulsome praise for Reagan: The New Democrats became Reaganites under the ‘Leadership’ of the Clintons.

The nomination of the utterly unpopular Hillary Clinton, by a demonstrably corrupt Party machine, made Circus Ringmaster Trump’s decisiveness, established by years of television propaganda, appeal to the notion of the ‘Strong Man’ authoritarian tendency in American political life. In a very real way the four victories of FDR helped to establish that ‘Strong Man’ ideology in the American psyche, if one is honest! The Trump victory, given this historical background, should not surprise!

Then Mr. Luce presents John McCain as the White Knight in his political morality tale. For an antidote to this bogus hagiography, see this Mint Press News essay by Whitney Webb, that confronts the facts of McCain’s support for Neo-Nazi’s in Ukraine and religious extremists in Syria.

In Christopher Hitchens reviled phrase ‘The chickens have come home to roost’ or to lapse into a pastiche of Biblical phraseology ‘You reap what you sow’! The rise and victory of Trump and Trumpism, are the watershed of the complete failure of America’s Political Class, aided and abetted by newspaper scribblers.

What is absent from Mr. Luce’s moralizing essay are these compelling historical facts, regarding the racism of the Republican Party : the Dixiecrat Mass Migration into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1960’s , the Goldwater Campaign proclamation that ‘extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice’, the Southern Strategy of Nixon, Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign based on ‘Welfare Queens Diving Cadillacs‘, Reagan’s Neshoba County Fair speech that opened his 1980 campaign: I believe in States Rights, within miles of where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered, Bush the Elder aided by the unmourned Lee Atwater in the notorious Willie Horton ads. The record, of the Dixiecrat colonization of the Republican Party, is utterly clear, except to those newspaper scribblers who might be able to plead historical ignorance. Mr. Luce’s vaunted expertise makes him ineligible to make such a claim!